buncag lalaw: nanay is

Today we are gathered in the Chapel of the retirement home of the clergy which for some reason has been called through the years as home sweet home.  Now it is given a more formal name of St John Marie Vianney Center or Vianney for short.  But some people still call this place Home Sweet Home.   Aptly but more clandestinely we call it our departure area for just like the upper floor of an airport this is where we wait before we fly out.  The archdiocese has enough lands more beautiful and conducive for a retirement home but this is the place they chose because it is just a stone's throw away from the place where our journey in the priesthood began.  It is always good to end where you started.  We all started there when we were 12 years old.  We come back here when the journey is about to end.

Today we gather to celebrate the Eucharist to mark what we call the bungcag lalaw.  Lalaw which means to mourn, and buncag means to diffuse, to disband.  After one year the black of mourning is disbanded, the veil of sadness is removed, the grieving for the dead is finally declared over.  Grieving has allowed us to look back, to hold on for a while to that sacred past that has made us what we are right now, to acknowledge with gratitude that life would not have been possible without her.  However, the buncag lalaw prods us to move on, to realize that there are some goodbyes that are final, some farewells that are somewhat permanent, and that there is no point in hanging about.  What is done has been done.  Life has to move on.

Probably one of those many things that make us priests feel nostalgic about this place beside having spent a greater part of our youth here, is also because we studied philosophy here.  Early on we were already taught in the Philosophy of St. Thomas the argument from necessity – that there is only one necessary being and that is God.  Objects, things, positions, and even mountains and continents, they come and they go; presidents, priests, health and life, they too pass away.  There is only one thing necessary which caused all these and it is God.  To be here in this place, our departure area, means to confront the basic realities of life.  And this is what we come here for – to break the grieving for we know that nothing, not even grief, lasts.

And yet we are truly thankful for Nanay Is and for all our parents especially.  Our gospel speaks of a father's plea for his child to Jesus.  Jesus healed a lot of people who came to show him faith.  But the most poignant healings are those interceded by fathers and mothers and friends.  We know and acknowledge that there are a lot in each one of us that are there in us not because of our own effort, not even because of our own wanting them, but solely because of the unconditional love and concern of our parents.  This buncag lalaw is not to leave that memory behind but to cherish them further in our words, in our actions, in the way we live our lives, the way we treat their children's children.